Explore Lucerne

The Chapel Bridge is a covered wooden footbridge that crosses the Reuss diagonally in Lucerne, built around 1365 as part of the town's fortifications and named after St. Peter's Chapel. About 200 metres long, it passes the stone Water Tower; triangular 17th-century paintings hang under its roof, many of them lost in a fire in 1993, after which the bridge was rebuilt.

The Jesuit Church of St. Francis Xavier stands on the left bank of the Reuss in Lucerne and was the first large Baroque church built in Switzerland north of the Alps. Construction began in 1667 and the church was consecrated in 1677, while its two onion-domed towers were completed only in 1893; a chapel inside keeps vestments of Brother Klaus.

The Musegg Wall is an 870-metre stretch of Lucerne's medieval fortifications along the Musegg hill north of the old town, built from around 1370 into the 15th century, with nine towers. Visitors walk along part of the wall and climb the Männli, Zyt, Wacht and Schirmer towers; the Zytturm clock, built in 1535, strikes a minute before the other clocks of the town.

The Spreuer Bridge is a covered wooden footbridge across the Reuss in Lucerne, completed in 1408 and largely rebuilt after a flood in 1566. Its gables hold 45 of the original 67 painted panels of a Dance of Death, made in 1626–1632 under the painter Kaspar Meglinger, and a small chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary stands on the bridge.

The Rosengart Collection is an art museum in Lucerne, opened in 2002 in a neoclassical building of 1922 that served as a branch of the Swiss National Bank until 1999. It shows the collection of the art dealer Siegfried Rosengart and his daughter Angela, with large groups of works by Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso alongside paintings by Cézanne, Monet and Seurat.

KKL Luzern, the Culture and Congress Centre of Lucerne, is a building by the French architect Jean Nouvel beside the lake and the railway station, under a projecting roof of 100 by 100 metres. Its concert hall opened in 1998 and is the main venue of the Lucerne Festival; the complex, completed in 2000, also houses the Kunstmuseum Luzern and conference rooms.

The Bourbaki Panorama is a circular painting by Edouard Castres from 1881, shown in a rotunda on Löwenplatz in Lucerne since 1889. About 112 metres long, it depicts General Bourbaki's French Eastern Army entering Switzerland at Les Verrières in 1871, at the end of the Franco-Prussian War, with three-dimensional figures and objects placed in front of the canvas.

The Church of St. Leodegar, known as the Hofkirche, is the Catholic parish and collegiate church that stands above the lakeshore in Lucerne, with twin pointed towers. It was built in 1633–1639 partly on the foundations of a Romanesque basilica that burned in 1633, and it is one of the few large churches erected north of the Alps during the Thirty Years' War.

The Lion Monument is a rock relief of a dying lion, carved in 1820–21 by Lukas Ahorn into a cliff face after a design by Bertel Thorvaldsen. It commemorates the Swiss Guards killed in 1792 when revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris; a Latin inscription runs above the lion and a small pond lies below the cliff.

The Richard Wagner Museum occupies the Tribschen country house on a peninsula of Lake Lucerne, where the composer lived from 1866 to 1872 and where his Siegfried Idyll was first performed in 1870. Opened as a museum in 1933, it shows rooms with Wagner's original furniture, an exhibition on his years in Lucerne and temporary exhibitions upstairs.

The Swiss Museum of Transport is a museum on the shore of Lake Lucerne that opened in 1959. Its halls cover rail, road, water, aviation and space travel, tourism, energy and communication, with locomotives, aircraft and Auguste Piccard's submarine Mésoscaphe; the site also has a planetarium, a large-format cinema and the Hans Erni Museum.

Pilatus is a mountain massif south of Lucerne whose highest point, the Tomlishorn, reaches 2,128 metres. A cogwheel railway opened in 1889 climbs from Alpnachstad at gradients of up to 48 percent, and gondolas and an aerial cableway rise from Kriens; at Pilatus Kulm there are viewing terraces, walking paths and two hotels.

The Rigi is a mountain massif between Lake Lucerne, Lake Zug and Lake Lauerz, east of Lucerne. Cogwheel railways from Vitznau and Arth-Goldau run up to Rigi Kulm, the 1,797-metre main summit in the canton of Schwyz, where a hotel has stood since 1816; a cable car also climbs from Weggis to Rigi Kaltbad, a base for walks.